


Being an account of an unnatural and cursed book, and how it was changed from what it ought to have been

by Aesoleucian



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Corruption, Gen, Statement, pretty damn horrible!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 06:30:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17136743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Document description: Notes on deviations from the original of a certain copy ofA Journal of the Plague Yeartaken by Thomas M. Hayes in the weeks before his death on April 7th, 1870. Donated by Dr. James McCormack on March 14th, 1912, with the following note attached:Having secluded myself for the prescribed forty days after my ‘secondhand reading’ as Hayes terms it, I am able to tell future readers that the only malady they may contract from these notes is a deep and painful malaise of the soul. If you are faint of heart or stomach; if the suffering of children or descriptions of terror, madness, and pestilence are wont to injure your health; do not read what follows. I consider myself a strong man but the horror of the plague year seems to have crept out and made its nest in me, such that I fear I may never be rid of it.





	Being an account of an unnatural and cursed book, and how it was changed from what it ought to have been

Some few months ago an unmarked edition of _A Journal of the Plague Year_ came into my possession, bound in a sick black-brown like old blood. After noticing a passage that was most assuredly not in the original I began cataloguing its deviations; the chiefest being the effects of reading certain parts of it aloud, and the more subtle being changes of wording, new passages, and the sickness which long contact has cultivated inside of me. Although it is already too late for me, and though I hope that a secondhand reading of any passage from this cursed book will not infect the reader, I must warn you that it may kill, and in a most terrible fashion; do not read it unwarily.

 

First. The incident of the people on the street who saw an angel, which is originally described as ‘an angel clothed in white, with a fiery sword in his hand, waving it or brandishing it over his head.’ The altered passage reads:

‘I think it was in March, seeing a crowd of people in the street, I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and found them all staring up into the air to see what a woman told them appeared plain to her, which was an angel with the appearance of a corpse, with withered brown skin and its eyes eaten away, wrapped in trailing bandages soaked with corruption, and with filthy wings missing many of their feathers. She described every part of the figure to the life, showed them the squirming motion of the maggots housed in its flesh, and the poor people came into it so eagerly, and with so much readiness; ‘Yes, I see it all plainly,’ says one; ‘there’s the wrapping as plain as can be.’ Another saw its very face, and cried out what a fearful creature it was, yet what a wondrous one. One saw one thing, and one another. I looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much willingness to be imposed upon, for though I did not dare ask I wondered how they could identify such an abominable thing as an angel; and I said, indeed, that I could see nothing but a dark cloud of smoke from somewhere else in the city. The woman endeavoured to show it me, but could not make me confess that I saw it, which, indeed, if I had I must have lied. But the woman, turning upon me, looked in my face, and fancied I laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor people were terrified by the force of their own imagination. However, she turned from me, called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me that it was a time of G-d’s anger, and dreadful judgements were approaching, and that despisers such as I should wander and perish.

The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she; and I found there was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them, and their faces began to look hungry and mad, their fingers grasping; I found them closing in on me and ran through the crowd in no small terror, pushing aside any in my way until I could not see them any more, for they would not move from their spot too far, entranced as they were by their angel.’

I was fool enough to read this passage aloud to a visiting friend, thinking it was curious and that it may interest him. He began to tremble, looking at something above and behind me, and in a quiet shaking voice he said, ‘There it is, Thomas, behind you. That thing that is _not_ an angel, reaching for your back with its withered hand.’ I could not have turned to see it if I dared; my body was turned to stone in my fear, but every second I fancied I could feel its claw gently on the back of my neck. But no, that was only a breeze. But this must be it truly—!

I know not how long I sat petrified, staring down at the book which I still held in my hands, but I was not able to move until I heard my friend collapse on the floor in a dead faint. At this point I leapt up without knowing I did, and rushed to him, and called for the porter to help me take him to a bed.

When he woke he could talk of nothing but the Angel of the Plague, as he called it, how it was a sign sent by G-d and surely another plague would be upon the country soon. I do not think that he will ever recover, and the fault is solely mine for showing him this cursed book. I have not read any other passage aloud, for fear of what it may do. G-d preserve me, and poor Henry, but I must note these fearful changes if there is any chance it might make them safe to read.

 

Second. An entirely new incident, following a passage rebuking certain ministers for their dismal sermons. The altered passage begins in the third paragraph here, with the preceding two presented for completeness:

‘Neither can I acquit those ministers that in their sermons rather sank than lifted up the hearts of their hearers. Many of them no doubt did it for the strengthening the resolution of the people, and especially for quickening them to repentance, but it certainly answered not their end, at least not in proportion to the injury it did another way; and indeed, as G-d Himself through the whole Scriptures rather draws to Him by invitations and calls to turn to Him and live, than drives us by terror and amazement, so I must confess I thought the ministers should have done also, imitating our blessed Lord and Master in this, that His whole Gospel is full of declarations from heaven of G-d’s mercy, and His readiness to receive penitents and forgive them, complaining, ‘Ye will not come unto Me that ye may have life’, and that therefore His Gospel is called the Gospel of Peace and the Gospel of Grace.

But we had some good men, and that of all persuasions and opinions, whose discourses were full of terror, who spoke nothing but dismal things; and as they brought the people together with a kind of horror, sent them away in tears, prophesying nothing but evil tidings, terrifying the people with the apprehensions of being utterly destroyed, not guiding them, at least not enough, to cry to heaven for mercy. 

One minister preached that G-d had sent this plague on the city as a gift, that we might know the truth of the world: that it is composed of nothing but infinite writhing, putrefying bodies that believe they are whole. ‘But no thing in this world is ever whole,’ he said. ‘We must rejoice in being unwhole and spread this knowledge to all the world.’ Saying this he threw open his garment to reveal the tokens of the distemper upon his chest and arms—and threw it into the crowd! Many began to shriek and scramble madly away from it, but some seemed bewitched by his speech and surged toward it, increasing the confusion as they did so; they were seen to be tearing it to pieces so that each could have a part. By the time the wardens arrived to shut up the church they had already dispersed with the pieces and it was too late to find any of them.’

 

Third. A description that could be taken as a house itself becoming ill, or putrefying—in the original the master of the house simply knocks a hole in the wall and his family escapes unscathed.

‘After the master of the house found there was no remedy, but that he, his wife, and his children were to be locked up with this poor distempered servant, he called to the watchman, and told him he must go then and fetch a nurse for them to attend this poor girl, for that it would be certain death to them all to oblige them to nurse her; and told him plainly that if he would not do this, the maid must perish either of the distemper or be starved for want of food, for he was resolved none of his family should go near her; and she lay in the garret four storey high, where she could not cry out, or call to anybody for help.

The watchman consented to that, and went and fetched a nurse, as he was appointed, and brought her to them the same evening. During this interval the master of the house took his opportunity to break a large hole through his shop into a bulk or stall, where formerly a cobbler had sat, before or under his shop-window; but when he did he found not brick and plaster and lumber but that was oozing with some unknown substance, clear and greenish with streaks of what could be blood or clay, which seemed to him to be like what he had heard of inside the tokens upon breaking open. Afrighted he ran back into his house, there to infect his wife and children with a distemper so quick and so violent that they all lay dead by the time the watchman and the nurse returned. Only the maid locked up in the garret still lived, knowing nothing of what had happened below; but as the nurse was tending to her the house began to creak and groan terribly, and they saw, or rather felt, that beneath their feet the boards had become soaked; and before they could escape the house collapsed, spattering the houses on either side with the issue of what seemed a sickness of the building itself; and when the sheriff was made aware of it he ordered all of the buildings to be burnt, and never mind who they belonged to.’

This is just one awful example of the many small changes of a certain class: that wherever any person in the original was lucky enough to escape the plague, the text has been altered to suggest that they did succumb. In the story of Captain John and his fellows, the party escapes the forest, where a town of the infected is beginning to spring up, to plead with their benefactor; only to become ill afterward. They die realizing that they have infected the kind justice of the peace who fed them, and indeed his manor stands empty, peopled with none but corpses.

I shudder to think what would have happened if this had been the passage I read aloud. Even now I fear, perhaps rationally or perhaps not, that merely putting my eyes upon it has condemned my poor house as it has condemned me.

 

Fourth. A terrible alteration that gives the plague pits their own life.

‘I say they had dug several pits in the ground, when the distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week; and they could not well dig them larger, because of the order of the magistrates confining them to leave no bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more in one pit. But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to more than was ever buried in any parish about London of no larger extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug—for such it was, rather than a pit. Around the gulf, when I saw it, there were disturbances of the ground, and at first I had the idea that they must be areas of the earth where the other pits had been filled in; but as I watched the buriers walking by them I could see that they looked nervously at these places and talked among themselves in low voices. I stayed for some time watching them about their work, and after a while I thought that the earth was growing more disturbed, though I could not know whether it was my imagination; until the ground had swelled up to a height of about three feet over an area of perhaps a dozen feet in either direction, and the buriers looked at it with more fear than ever. After some hushed discussion one man, who I could not say was brave because of the dead fear in his eyes, came to the swelling with his shovel and struck at it with the blade, whereupon it burst; earth fountained into the air and naked bodies surged up as if some pressure from beneath was pushing them up, and the man screamed and threw down his shovel.

It took some time for the buriers to gain the courage to go near the thing, which I would not have done for any sum of money, but they knew their duty; they began to bury again the corpses, and those that overflowed the six feet as ordered had to be put into the new pit. I left the churchyard greatly disturbed in my mind, having seen the other patches of earth that looked like it, and wondering whether they too would not burst as if the very earth bore tokens of the same sickness; and indeed when I had occasion to go to Whitechappel I found the churchyard there likewise infected with the awful earthen boils, of which two burst while I was watching. I asked the buriers about them, and though few enough were willing to speak to me of it, fearing it as a great evil, they said that no dead had been buried there nor any pit dug; and that they did not know whence the bodies came, because they were not buried by any mortal hand. When I crept close enough to see clearly the misfortunate dead I could not tell their faces or anything about them because they were crusted in dirt and had innumerable growths or boils obscuring their faces; and I had the most terrible thought that perhaps they were people who had never died yet at all.

They had supposed the pit at Aldgate would have supplied them for a month or more when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the whole parish, and the like; but time made it appear the churchwardens knew the condition of the parish better than they did: for, the pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface. I doubt not but there may be some ancient persons alive in the parish who can justify the fact of this, and are able to show even in what place of the churchyard the pit lay better than I can. The mark of it also was many years to be seen in the churchyard on the surface, lying in length parallel with the passage which goes by the west wall of the churchyard out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechappel, coming out near the Three Nuns’ Inn, as the similar scars of the bursting pits still appear around it.’

 

Fifth. An awful, if thankfully unsubstantiated, rumor about the indiscretions of nurses—the last of the rumors being the one that did not appear in the original.

‘They did tell me, indeed, of a nurse in one place that laid a wet cloth upon the face of a dying patient whom she tended, and so put an end to his life, who was just expiring before; and another that smothered a young woman she was looking to when she was in a fainting fit, and would have come to herself; some that killed them by giving them one thing, some another, and some starved them by giving them nothing at all. It was said that one nurse would break open the tokens upon the invalids and collect the issue in a vial, which she carried on her always and would drink as a tonic in the same way others drank tonics to ward off the sickness. But these stories had two marks of suspicion that always attended them, which caused me always to slight them and to look on them as mere stories that people continually frighted one another with. First, that wherever it was that we heard it, they always placed the scene at the farther end of the town, opposite or most remote from where you were to hear it. If you heard it in Whitechappel, it had happened at St Giles’s, or at Westminster, or Holborn, or that end of the town. If you heard of it at that end of the town, then it was done in Whitechappel, or the Minories, or about Cripplegate parish. If you heard of it in the city, why, then it happened in Southwark; and if you heard of it in Southwark, then it was done in the city, and the like.’

 

Sixth. Inserted the story of a mother with corrupted milk that seems to concentrate the deadly essence of the sickness, with such a description as makes me shudder to read.

‘I could tell here dismal stories of living infants being found sucking the breasts of their mothers, or nurses, after they have been dead of the plague. Of a mother in the parish where I lived, who, having a child that was not well, sent for an apothecary to view the child; and when he came, as the relation goes, was giving the child suck at her breast, and to all appearance was herself very well; but when the apothecary came close to her he saw the tokens upon that breast with which she was suckling the child. He was surprised enough, to be sure, but, not willing to fright the poor woman too much, he desired she would give the child into his hand; so he takes the child, and going to a cradle in the room, lays it in, and opening its cloths, found no token whatsoever upon it, but that it had milk dribbling from the corner of its mouth; and that this milk was not right but tinted yellow and filled with lumps as if it had curdled. Asking its mother he found out that until today a nurse had been giving it suck but she had feared she was sick and so gave it to its mother, and that the child had scarce drunk of her milk at all; and yet when they went to pick it up again it had died with that corrupted milk pooling around its head; the doctor pronounced, although as gently as he could, that her very milk was poison and that she had killed her child, and she died of grief soon after. Likewise of a child brought home to the parents from a nurse that had died of the plague, yet the tender mother would not refuse to take in her child, and laid it in her bosom, by which she was infected; and died with the child in her arms dead also.’

This version also deletes the following paragraph:

‘It would make the hardest heart move at the instances that were frequently found of tender mothers tending and watching with their dear children, and even dying before them, and sometimes taking the distemper from them and dying, when the child for whom the affectionate heart had been sacrificed has got over it and escaped.’

For even the death of a mother to save her child is not terrible enough for this cursed book if any child survives it.

 

Seventh, and I fear last for my hand begins to shake too badly to write, and it is difficult to let no tear fall on these notes. Rather than denying the evil of human nature as the original does, this author in his despair wholeheartedly supports the explanation of certain acts by wickedness and corruption.

‘Another thing might render the country more strict with respect to the citizens, and especially with respect to the poor, and this was what I hinted at before: namely, that there was a seeming propensity or a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others.

There have been great debates among our physicians as to the reason of this. Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease, and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of a rage, and a hatred against their own kind—as if there was a malignity not only in the distemper to communicate itself, but in the very nature of man, prompting him with evil will or an evil eye, that, as they say in the case of a mad dog, who though the gentlest creature before of any of his kind, yet then will fly upon and bite any one that comes next him, and those as soon as any who had been most observed by him before.

Others placed it to the account of the corruption of human nature, who cannot bear to see itself more miserable than others of its own species, and has a kind of involuntary wish that all men were as unhappy or in as bad a condition as itself.

I hold this position: that it is not any common distemper that so affects man, but a specially evil one that twists not only the body but the soul and mind as well; for how else could it be explained that in this case above all others man runs eagerly to destroy his neighbor? This plague was one created to show the most foul and wicked side of humanity, and to turn all men to it; and this it did, with such success that at its height I despaired of ever seeing the good in mankind again, and indeed it is slow returning, if it returns at all.’

 

Smaller deviations are catalogued elsewhere in my papers, and to be sure there are more major ones, but I fear I can no longer write without terrible pain, and any servants I could have dictated to I have long begged to abandon me to my slow death. I shall die alone in my room with the most monstrous images branded into my eyelids so that I can get no respite from them; and something in me believes this no less than what I deserve for opening such a cursed book. I remain yours, though for not much longer,

Thos. Hayes, Esq.


End file.
